Back The F:\ Up!

OK i did something stupid (nothing new here) i didn’t backup data i have never done so ever before, mainly because i have not had a hard drive die on me thanks to the modern day hard disks! But this was a blessing in disguise because it led me into a false sense of security to a place where data never disappears and as long as you don’t delete it, it will be there the next day. I tell a lie i did kind of backup data but the problem seemed to be that i only backed it up on one place, an external hard drive which subsequently was the very device that failed me. I lost my music collection, code, documents, ebooks, and other stuff that i can’t remember yet but that’s one of the horrors of losing data; you remeber what you lost when you need it and the pains starts again.

Lucky i didnt lose anything with an imminet deadline like some C code that was to be submitted the next day! But i did lose my music and ebook collection that took a while to assemble, but o well that’ll teach me. I guess i tested it’s physical endurance as i kicked it off my table (by accident i might add (don’t relax and put your feet up around hardware).

So with two stupid things done that day i decided i would backup to a file server as soon as i fix it :-S and my desktop using git so we’ll see how that works out.

And for my pain I at least earned a t-shirt from Mozy.com. Check them out for online remote backups and backthefup.net with how to get a t-shirt.

Dropping the Mouse

Over the past year and a half i have been seriously experimenting with different Linux distros not like when i was 12 years old and downloaded Xandros (Only thing i could find) because I was pissed off with Windows.

I had no idea what Linux was or Open Source was, I just wanted Windows to be gone from my computer! And I soon got that but I wasn’t prepared for Linux then and had nobody to seek help from and i didn’t even know what i had, all i knew was when i tried to configure xconf it would break (no surprise there) and i couldn’t work with the resolution it gave me or get it give me the correct resolution so i reverted back to Windows.

Distro

Fast forward 6 years i tried again with Ubuntu which was no problem to install and got the hang of using a terminal and configuring some things (no xorgconf here), i then tried Fedora because a new version was released but that was short lived (didn’t enjoy yum and some other things i missed in Ubuntu at the time.) so i went back to Ubuntu because it worked.

I used Ubuntu for about a year and played with Fluxbox window manager and really got into using the terminal for all my tasks but still felt i wasn’t really using Linux. Then this year now a competent Linux user (in some respects) i tried ArchLinux which is considered a more geeky distro. The installation was easy unlike other distros that are attracted to by advanced users like Slackware or Gentoo and i learned more about actual Linux using Arch in 1 month than i did in 6 with Ubuntu mainly because i was forced too and lots of things were abstracted on Ubuntu so you never really get to the nitty gritty stuff but i think Ubuntu is perfect for new users, and I’ll always recommend it to new people looking to use Linux.

For me Arch is more fun been a Computer Science student i enjoy configuring and setting things up the way i like, and the power Linux can give me, and since then i haven’t looked back on Ubuntu, Arch’s pacman and yaourt are ace and in most cases I’ve found it’s packages are more bleeding-edge than Ubuntu.

I’d like to thank Cycles who introduced me to Arch as it has ended my distro-hopping days for the foreseeable future.

Window Manager

Since I started using Arch, my window manager of choice has been Xmonad a tiling window manager, with Xmobar which are both written in Haskell and dmenu.

Up until then I had never used a tilling windows manager but it’s easy to learn, it’s just what i was waiting for, (for like 4years!) I always hated moving around, resizing windows in Windows and Linux but that’s a thing of the past andim probably more productive because of it.

 

Xmonad with dzen

If you don’t know what Xmonad is you should check it out there are other tiling managers too like Awesome which is pretty good too.

A Bit About My Project

While I still have the motivation I thought I would write a bit about my individual research project that I started about three and a half weeks ago.

The project is in the field of Natural Language Processing and what I am aiming to do is get some useful results using the tools already provided by my University.

I am going to use their existing NLP techniques for grammatical and semantic analysis and other tools such as WebBootCat for corpus compilation in the hope of improving web corpus compilation techniques. The main tools I’m using are WMatrix, JMatrix and WebBootCat as already mentioned.

So that’s a rough outline of what I’m trying to achieve now what have I been doing for the past month?

Since I got the project I have mainly been reading about NLP and it’s key terms so I understand what my supervisors’ are talking about! And so that I can use the tools and understand it’s output.

Sample output from WMatrix using POS tagging and arranged by frequency:

 

Jocks                NP2          2561
county               NN1          2558
singers              NN2          2473
is                   VBZ          2434
to                   TO           2192
pa                   NN1          2061
for                  IF           1523
language             NN1          1377
that                 CST          1362

So now that I have played around with the tools I’m approaching the stage were I will be starting to think about my project goals.  

 

What kind of results can be achieved?

Some examples could be:

• Was it written by a child or adult. 
• Somone pretending to be a child or adult. 
• Was it written by a man or women. (see: Gender Analyzer)
• The level of english e.g. that of a High School pupil or a Professor.
• The technical quality of an article. 
• Could be particulary useful for search engines of particular types of results wanted e.g. technical papers, blogs, articles, etc.

 
 

So as you can see the possiblities are exciting and plentiful.

Is this thing on?

I’ll be blogging about my projects and other stuff (if I can muster anything worth saying!) so watch this space.  

Until then check out reddit.com